Pete McMartin: Welcome to Man-o-stan! Land of plov, kumiss and disco!

Pete McMartin, Vancouver Sun columnist07.10.2013

Robert Marthaller, foreground, a high school English teacher, and Justin Kinvig, a human resources manager with a bank, are currently on a six-week tour of all seven ‘Stans’ – Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. They believe they are the first Canadians to ever do so in one trip.

Robert Marthaller says it started years ago when he and Justin Kinvig were on the Trans-Siberian Railway a couple of days outside of Moscow. Looking out the train window, he saw a spur line with a sign that read “To Kazakhstan.”

“And I said to Justin, ‘Man, we gotta go to Kazakhstan!’ And Justin said, ‘I don’t care what Stan we go to, but let’s go to some Stan.”

Kinvig, on the other hand, thinks the idea came to them while they were waiting for the Dover ferry to go to France. They had just left London. They had bought a car for $200, and Kinvig remembers saying to Marthaller, “Man, we got our own car and we’re raring to go … let’s just start driving until we hit a Stan.”

That was some time ago, too. But the idea, however it started, stayed with them, and a couple of years ago they began to plan it in earnest.

Their idea? They would visit all the seven Central Asian “Stans” in one trip — Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. They would be, they thought, the first Canadians ever to do so.

They would call the trip The Man-o-stan Project.

Marthaller, 34, an English high school teacher, and Kinvig, 35, a human resources manager for a bank, have known each other since growing up in the Okanagan. They moved to Vancouver a year after school, and not long after that they were on the first trip together — they went to Australia.

Since then, they’ve seen much of the world.

“Between the two of us,” Marthaller said, “we’ve been to just over 140 countries, sometimes together, sometimes on our own. We’ve been to every continent except Antarctica.”

Marthaller’s most recent trip was with his fiancé, Amanda — they travelled the length of Africa, by bus and jitney, mostly, from Cairo to Cape Town. They got married two weeks ago.

This would make Amanda one of the most understanding wives in history. Instead of taking his new wife off on a honeymoon, Marthaller flew to Pakistan last week with Kinvig. It was the first leg of their trip. They did the interview for this story by phone from Islamabad.

“A couple of years ago,” Marthaller said, “me and Justin got together, and I won’t say we were drinking — but we were — and I said if we’re going to go to one Stan we sure as hell might as well go to all them.”

It took six months of planning — looking into security concerns, booking flights and arranging for visas, a particularly troublesome process, Marthaller said, since six of the seven Stans required visas and none of them wanted to be the first to grant one. The original plan also called for five other guys to come along on the trip, but one by one the other five backed out, for various reasons.

“One of them,” Marthaller said, “has a wife that said, ‘He ain’t going.’ She was pretty clear about that.”

Afghanistan, of course, was problematic. They couldn’t just fly into Kabul, walk around and, as Marthaller put it, “wear T-shirts that say, ‘I’m with stupid.’”

But after getting some advice from the Afghan consulate here, the pair decided they would enter Afghanistan from the north and cross the border at Tajikistan. The north, while still an area where Taliban forces are active, is quieter and relatively safer than the south. The pair’s stay will be short — five days by local bus — with the highlight a visit to the Blue Mosque at Mazar-i-Sharif.

“We found that in travelling through India and Africa that travelling by local bus was the best way to travel, because bandits aren’t expecting you to be travelling with the locals with their chickens and goats.”

Of all the Stans, they most look forward to seeing Turkmenistan. It was the hardest country to get permission to enter, Marthaller said, and the most closed-off.

Of the cities, they look forward to seeing Samarkand and Bukhara in Uzbekistan, both of them stops along the old Silk Road route to China, and both filled with architectural and historical treasures.

Food? They want to reacquaint themselves with plov, a pilaf cooked in lamb fat and laced with horsemeat, and kumiss, a fermented mare’s milk they had once on their cereal during a trip to Outer Mongolia.

“It looked disgusting,” Marthaller said, “but it was delicious.”

As for entertainment, they hope to find some in Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan.

“Yeah, we heard Bishkek is renowned for its discotheque scene.”

Marthaller said he would be going to a disco merely as Kinvig’s wingman. He was recently married, after all, and has a wife to get back to.

The trip, Marthaller said, will take five to six weeks. Then it’s back to Vancouver. Then he and Amanda will fly off to Paris and Amsterdam for their postponed honeymoon.

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